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Veteran business owners are essential contributors to American society and the U. S. economy. Statistics showed a looming drawdown of military personnel and comparatively higher unemployment rates than the civilian population, which led to a growing interest in assisting veterans with entrepreneurship. Studies show that military service has a strong association with entrepreneurship. Few studies have identified key factors of veteran business ownership and action-oriented questions on how or why veteran entrepreneurs find their way to business ownership. There are calls in the literature to answer the question of whether entrepreneurial competencies can influence entrepreneurial intentions. Veterans are often faced with the challenge of building a second career following separation from the military. There is limited research about what factors may motivate and support their transition to self-employment or how they fare compared to nonveteran employees. Furthermore, there are no studies that examine the role of resilience in the entrepreneurial process related to American Veteran Entrepreneurs. The purpose of the study is to determine if resilience and entrepreneurial competencies influence veteran entrepreneurial intention to start a business. This study examines the relationship between entrepreneurial competencies and entrepreneurial intentions among Veterans.
Federal legislation has mandated students with and without disabilities be prepared for college and careers (ESSA, 2015; IDEA, 2004). Students with high-incidence disabilities experience less success than their peers without disabilities (Newman et al., 2011). Initially, college and career readiness efforts lacked a focus on students with disabilities (e.g., Conley 2007, 2008), but recent efforts have increased the focus on students with disabilities (e.g., Morningstar et al., 2017). The predictors of post-school success appear to be a viable option to bridge both efforts. Students with high-incidence disabilities spend at least part of their day in general education classes (NCES, 2017), but general education teachers report wanting additional information to prepare students with high-incidence disabilities for college and careers (Kwiatek, 2017). General educators identified the predictors of post-school success as relevant, important, and feasible for implementation (Kwiatek et al., 2021). Coupling the alignment between secondary transition and college and career readiness, the predictors of post-school success appear to be an ideal option to provide general educators with professional development to prepare students with high-incidence disabilities for college and careers. The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the effects of an asynchronous online intervention (i.e., General Educators Now Embedding Research [for] Adult Life in Educational Design [GENERAL ED]) on general education teachers’ knowledge of research-based, in-school predictors of post-school success. Results indicated a functional relation between the asynchronous online intervention and increased knowledge of three predictors of post-school success. Effect sizes were large for increased knowledge of the predictors of post-school success. Additional measures included application; confidence; generalization; and social validity (i.e., feasibility evaluation, intervention rating scale). Finally, limitations, suggestions for future research, and implications for practice will be discussed.
This quantitative study explores the potential school-level and school district-level factors associated with North Carolina school performance grades in K-5 elementary schools. The desire was to examine if any of the school- or school district-level factors were associated with the outcome variable of North Carolina school performance grades. This study used the data from the North Carolina school report cards and Civil Rights Data Collection from the 2015 – 2016 school year. The sample had 1096 schools and 92 school districts. A hierarchical linear model was created with the overall school performance grade as the outcome variable and the sixteen school level predictors and thirteen school district predictors. Results indicated that twelve out of sixteen school-level variables were statistically significant. One out of thirteen school district-level variables were statistically significant and two additional variables approached significance. Recommendations for improving student achievement were provided for United States policymakers, university education programs, North Carolina policymakers, local governments, school districts, and schools. These recommendations are presented as opportunities to ensure equitable educational practices and outcomes for all students.
The availability of OpenCL for FPGAs along with High-Level Synthesis tools have made FPGAs an attractive platform for realizing massively parallel compute-intensive applications. FPGAs with their customizable data-path, deep pipelining abilities and enhanced power efficiency features are the most viable solutions for programming and integrating them with heterogeneous platforms. Furthermore, OpenCL for FPGAs raises many challenges which require in-depth understanding to better utilize their enormous capabilities. In this work we identify, analyze and categorize the semantic differences between the OpenCL parallelism and the execution model on FPGAs. As an end result we propose a generic taxonomy for classifying FPGA parallelism potential.
At the same time, new design challenges continue to emerge for massive thread-level parallelism on FPGAs. One major execution bottleneck is the high number of memory stalls exposed to data-path which overshadows the benefits of data-path customization. We introduce a unique approach for hiding the memory stalls on FPGAs when running massively parallel applications and present a novel LLVM-based tool for decoupling memory access from computations. To enable systematic decoupling, we use the idea of kernel parallelism and implement a new parallelism granularity that breaks down kernels to separate data-path and memory-path (memory read/write) which work concurrently to overlap the computation of current threads with the memory access of future threads (memory pre-fetching at large scale).
We next move to the Xilinx based AWS cloud platform and conduct an exhaustive study on the scalability of OpenCL coarse-grain parallelism, Compute Unit(CU) replication on cloud FPGAs. In addition we present a generic template and a front-end design exploration tool to explore and identify the optimum CU number for a given application, while hiding the programming and exploration difficulties from programmers.
Special education continues to be the most litigated area of education with minimal requirements for the local education authority, typically an administrator, to have a fundamental understanding of special education law and practices. Additionally, federal, state, and local accountability measures indicate a significant achievement gap between students with disabilities and their peers. Given these concerns, there is a need for research on ways to improve administrator’s knowledge about special education as well as close the achievement gap between the two groups.
This qualitative study aims to explore perceptions about the role of an administrator for special education programming in order to identify specific areas of special education programming knowledge administrators need to be effective for special education. Interviews were conducted with three key stakeholder groups: special education teachers, general education teachers, and administrators, in order to ascertain converging and diverging perspectives about the role of an administrator for special education programming.
Findings in this study supported prior work around the lack of knowledge administrators had about special education law and practice. However, the findings went further to explore the skills needed to implement the knowledge administrators need in order to be effective for special education programming. Specifically, this study found that educational philosophy was an influential aspect to overall effectiveness of administrators for special education. Additionally, the ability to advocate (or champion) for the betterment of all stakeholders, and growth mindset were identified as key themes participants felt were necessary for an administrator to be effective for special education programming. These findings support the need for additional training that education administrators should receive to not only understand special education law, but also how to be an effective administrator for special education programming.
KEY WORDS: Special education, School administrators and special education, Administrator preparation, Systems Thinking Theory, Administrator roles
NUBIA A. CASTILLO DE VALLE. How does family firm status moderate the relationship between organizational readiness for change and organizational resilience in times of crisis? (Under the direction of DR. TORSTEN M. PIEPER)
The literature on organizational resilience shows that there has been little research about organizational resilience drivers. This study aimed to empirically explore if organizational readiness for change, precisely the three dimensions of organizational readiness for change, as determinants of organizational resilience. And how firms’ structure moderates that relationship in the context of change (adoption or usage of technology) in times of COVID-19. SMART-PLS is a statistical technique that has become popular in business and social sciences. The PLS-SEM measurement model was used to assess the reliability and validity of the instrument in this study. The result suggests that psychometrics are reliable and evidence of rational validity. This research is important because it will influence organizational resilience research, and it will inform managers practitioners on how to prepare for disruption and build resilient organizations. The data was sourced via a survey by Qualtrics for a total sample of 160 companies divided into 80 family firms and 80 non-family firms. The target responders were leaders of those organizations. The results suggested that only management support and change efficacy have a direct relationship with organizational resilience. Since this is an empirical cross-sectional study, causality is not inferred and not able to be generalized. Appropriateness was not significant. The moderations variables were not significant. This study suggests that two dimensions of organizational readiness for change (management support and change efficacy) could predict organizational resilience. Keywords: PLS-SEM, Organizational resilience, COVID-19, Firm Structure, Organizational readiness for change.
Thermal stress has been identified as one of the major failure causes in the power module. It is generated from the mechanical strain by severely varying temperatures at different loci in the power module and the different coefficients of the thermal expansion of materials, where the varying temperatures result from the real-time power loss across the power converter. This thermal stress accelerates the degradation of semiconductor devices, downgrades the system quality and efficiency, and eventually causes catastrophic system breakdowns and extensive economic losses. Therefore, this research is dedicated to investigating both local control level methods and system level strategies to ameliorate the real-time power loss in order to reduce the thermal stress in the power module, thereby extend the component lifetime and enhance the system reliability. A finite-control-set model predictive control (FCS-MPC) is introduced and deductively investigated from the local control level. Its variable switching frequency property is derived through the geometry analysis on the voltage vector space. It realizes the switching frequency variation autonomously by the loading power. By taking advantage of this property, the power loss is leveled in the real-time operation by FCS-MPC, and a more mitigated thermal profile is acquired compared with the one by the conventional controller. Furthermore, a centralized thermal stress oriented dispatch (TSOD) system level strategy is proposed for multiple paralleled distributed energy resource systems, which helps to reduce the thermal stress in the power module of paralleled converters. It is thermal stress oriented and takes effect according to the real-time junction temperature variation, the health condition of the individual converter, and the system operation. Two local control level methods, the switching frequency variation and the reactive power injection, are imported separately as the dispatch algorithm to generate the expected power loss. Dealing with the varying mission profile, the more mitigated thermal profiles are achieved for all converters with the assistance of the proposed TSOD strategy.
Localization and communication are critical components for functioning autonomous robots. The infrastructure required for these operations commonly includes global positioning system (GPS) and easily recognizable and re-identifiable landmarks. However, these types of infrastructures are not always readily available. This research has developed a deploy-able electronic way-point system dubbed ’BreadCrumbs’. BreadCrumbs function as electronic landmarks that can provide localization and communication capabilities to a robot in environments where such infrastructure is not inherently present. When deployed by a forward moving agent with a set destination, the BreadCrumbs also form a series of way-points which reduce the possible state space an autonomous robot must search through when path planning in an unknown or unmapped environment. The BreadCrumbs are self localizing and have several methods for initial location determination based on the environment they are placed in. GPS is not required for the BreadCrumbs to function and, once established, they can function as landmarks for autonomous robots by providing range data from radio signal strength with a path loss exponent determined through a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient algorithm.
Family business leaders often include preserving socioemotional wealth (SEW) and successful intergenerational succession efforts in their list of primary non-economic goals, yet most next-generation family members seek careers outside of the family business.
This research aims to understand how internal family dynamics affect the development of psychological ownership feelings towards the family business in next-generation family members. The moderating effect of gender, as socially constructed, was also explored.
Data was collected using a snowball technique and an anonymous online survey (n=161) and was analyzed using regression analysis. Next-generation family members were encouraged to participate regardless of their ownership of, or employee status within, the business. The family dynamics measured were cognitive cohesion, emotional cohesion, adaptability, communication, intergenerational attention to needs, and authority. Findings are included, followed by discussion, limitations, and future directions for research. Currently, family business scholars have a limited understanding of how and when psychologically related micro-factors manifest in next-generation family members; however, relationships have been identified between a business family's internal dynamics and the development of certain attitudes, beliefs, and feelings held by their next-generation family members. Despite this research's similarities to past examples in the SEW and related literature streams, no support was found for this study's hypothesized relationships. Additional empirical research is necessary to understand when and how a business family's internal dynamics influence the manifestation of psychological ownership feelings in their next-generation family members.
